What the hell is it with Sandra Bullock's lousy choice of movies? Despite being a talented and likable screen presence who backed this year's surprise Oscar winner, Crash, Bullock's CV is littered with ghastly tripe like Forces of Nature and Hope Floats, which should rightly have sunk her career. Bullock's latest exercise in on-screen hari-kiri is The Lake House, a time-travelling love story in which she co-stars with Keanu Reeves, who plays a talented but troubled architect. Just savour that thought for a moment. Sandra and Keanu share the eponymous lake house, although due to a Dr Who-style warp in the time-space continuum, they are separated by a two-year ellipsis, which can only be breached by placing notes in a mailbox which acts as a portal between dimensions. (Time-travelling note to Sandra: 'Dear Ms Bullock. If you are reading this letter in the past, please save your future by not making this lousy movie.')

Sandra and Keanu are in love or would be if they'd met. Actually, they have met - and talked and kissed. But she has a convenient habit of forgetting what her old boyfriends look like and he can't remember her because, hey, he hasn't met her yet! But he can plant trees outside her apartment which spring up overnight without anyone noticing, and she can send books and scarves back into the past without precipitating the sort of 'butterfly effect' catastrophes with which sci-fi writers have wrestled for years.

Adapted from the South Korean movie Il Mare, and directed by Argentinian director Alejandro Agresti, this syrup-drenched supernatural whimsy achieves stupidity at a genuinely international level. The screenplay is by award-winning Proof playwright David Auburn, who has clearly never seen Time After Time or Twelve Monkeys or read Tom's Midnight Garden or The Time Traveller's Wife, and has zero grasp of the complexities of split-time narratives. The result is incoherent twaddle, as badly designed as the titular glass structure which positively invites brick-throwing. The last time Bullock and Reeves were together on screen the result was Speed. This should have been entitled Stop.

Demi Moore fares no better with her latest clunker, Half Light. This dumb-as-nuts chiller casts her as a bestselling American novelist living in London (look, there's the Gherkin!) who decamps to Scotland (listen, here's some Celtic folk music!) after her young son drowns. Distraught Demi is beset by creepy visions of her dead child, but cheers up in the company of an enigmatic lighthouse keeper (Hans Matheson), who soon warms her cockles. Australian writer/director Craig Rosenberg clearly imagines that his target audience are morons and so flags up every salient plot point with conveniently placed newspaper headlines which are duly waved before the cameras.

Oddly, none of these announces 'Filmmaker Sent to Jail for Wanton Plagiarism' even as the movie plunders the opening of Don't Look Now, the sinister Scottish locales of The Wicker Man (actually Wales) and the 'guess who's a ghost' twists of The Sixth Sense, all culminating in a daft lighthouse-bound climax, which is less Vertigo than Final Analysis. In America, the film proceeded directly to DVD. Expect to see it in your local Blockbuster soon.

Hong Kong director Ronny Yu deserves a place in any cineaste's heart for directing both the trend-setting Eastern fantasy, The Bride with White Hair, and the splendid Hollywood horror satire, Bride of Chucky. In Fearless, he provides a steady hand on the tiller as leading man Jet Li bids a fortysomething farewell to the 'wushu' genre. Despite the high-profile presence of action man Yuen Wo Ping, whose balletic fight choreography graced The Matrix and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, this loose retelling of martial-arts hero Huo Yuanjia's life story eschews high-flying pyrotechnics in favour of more down-to-earth battles. The narrative follows a traditional pathway from hot-headed, punchy youth to wise but powerful adulthood via a rice-picking sojourn in a rural backwater, where meditative lessons are duly learned. Li's dramatic range may be limited, but Yu's handsome film invests his character with a fitting air of sincerity.

The tooth-and-nails terrors of high-school girlhood have inspired such scabrous satires as Michael Lehman's cult classic Heathers and Alexander Payne's bristling Election, alongside softer derivatives like the more recent Mean Girls. Pretty Persuasion is described by its director as an 'anti high-school movie' and flaunts a vulgar turn of phrase (it's rated 18 for 'very strong sex references') closer in tone to Matthew Bright's terrifically sleazy teensploiter Freeway.

Spiky adolescent Evan Rachel Wood continues to build on the petulant promise of Thirteen as Beverly Hills brat Kimberly who captures media attention by charging her drama teacher with sexual abuse. The flip-flop time structure deliberately obscures culpability, while salacious set-pieces (Selma Blair playing schoolgirl dress-up) stray into duplicitously dubious waters. It's neither as daring nor as clever as it thinks, but stalwart scene-stealer James Woods deserves an award for his groin-stroking, belly-waving, anti-semite father who draws all the most outre laughs.

If Aeon Flux was The Matrix for fetishists, then Ultraviolet is Aeon Flux for fools. A shambles even by 'model-slash-actress' Milla Jovovich's low-kicking standards, this futuristic hooey finds quasi-vampiric 'haemophages' battling totalitarian humans with swords, guns and low-slung hipsters. Tacky, noisy, and fashionably out of focus, it's like being trapped in a L'Oreal hair-colour commercial with added drums and dismemberment. Apparently, director Kurt Wimmer's original two-hour cut was butchered by the studio. Shame they didn't cut the remaining 87 minutes.